To Ctesiphon
- In acquainting me with the new controversy which has taken the place of the old you are wrong in thinking that you have acted rashly, for your conduct has been prompted by zeal and friendship. Already before the arrival of your letter many in the East have been deceived into a pride which apes humility and have said with the devil: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will be like the Most High. Can there be greater presumption than to claim not likeness to God but equality with Him, and so to compress into a few words the poisonous doctrines of all the heretics which in their turn flow from the statements of the philosophers, particularly of Pythagoras and Zeno the founder of the Stoic school? For those states of feeling which the Greeks call πάθη and which we may describe as passions, relating to the present or the future such as vexation and gladness, hope and fear — these, they tell us, it is possible to root out of our minds; in fact all vice may be destroyed root and branch in man by meditation on virtue and constant practice of it. The position which they thus take up is vehemently assailed by the Peripatetics who trace themselves to Aristotle, and by the new Academics of whom Cicero is a disciple; and these overthrow not the facts of their opponents — for they have no facts — but the shadows and wishes which do duty for them. To maintain such a doctrine is to take man’s nature from him, to forget that he is constituted of body as well as soul, to substitute mere wishes for sound teaching. For the apostle says:— O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? But as I cannot say all that I wish in a short letter I will briefly touch on the points that you must avoid. Virgil writes:—
Thus mortals fear and hope, rejoice and grieve, And shut in darkness have no sight of heaven.
For who can escape these feelings? Must we not all clap our hands when we are joyful, and shrink at the approach of sorrow? Must not hope always animate us and fear put us in terror? So in one of his Satires the poet Horace, whose words are so weighty, writes:
- Well does one of our own writers say: the philosophers are the patriarchs of the heretics. It is they who have stained with their perverse doctrine the spotlessness of the Church, not knowing that of human weakness it is said: Why is earth and ashes proud? So likewise the apostle: I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity; and again, The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not that I do. Now if Paul does what he wills not, what becomes of the assertion that a man may be without sin if he will? Given the will, how is it to have its way when the apostle tells us that he has no power to do what he wishes? Moreover if we ask them who the persons are whom they regard as sinless they seek to veil the truth by a new subterfuge. They do not, they say, profess that men are or have been without sin; all that they maintain is that it is possible for them to be so. Remarkable teachers truly, who maintain that a thing may be which on their own showing, never has been; whereas the scripture says:— The thing which shall be, it is that which has been already of old time.
I need not go through the lives of the saints or call attention to the moles and spots which mark the fairest skins. Many of our writers, it is true, unwisely, take this course; however, a few sentences of scripture will dispose alike of the heretics and the philosophers. What says the chosen vessel? God had concluded all in unbelief that he might have mercy upon all; and in another place, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. The preacher also who is the mouthpiece of the Divine Wisdom freely protests and says: there is not a just man upon earth, that does good and sins not: and again, if your people sin against you, for there is no man that sins not: and who can say, I have made my heart clean? and none is clean from stain, not even if his life on earth has been but for one day. David insists on the same thing when he says: Behold, I was shapen in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me; and in another psalm, in your sight shall no man living be justified. This last passage they try to explain away from motives of reverence, arguing that the meaning is that no man is perfect in comparison with God. Yet the scripture does not say: in comparison with you shall no man living be justified but in your sight shall no man living be justified. And when it says in your sight it means that those who seem holy to men to God in his fuller knowledge are by no means holy. For man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. But if in the sight of God who sees all things and to whom the secrets of the heart lie open no man is just; then these heretics instead of adding to man’s dignity, clearly take away from God’s power. I might bring together many other passages of scripture of the same import; but were I to do so, I should exceed the limits I will not say of a letter but of a volume.